It is an important concern to ensure the safety of transport vehicle drivers as well as other drivers on the road. It is also important to ensure that transport vehicles are well maintained to operate in an efficient and safe manner.
Transport vehicles are known to have electronic on-board recorder (EOBR) devices that capture and store data related to vehicle operation. Analysing such data can be used to address safety concerns.
However, accessing safety-related data can be cumbersome and not user-friendly. Existing reports and scorecards are not readily understood by those who need them. Further, there is little in the way of prioritization of problems that require attention. Moreover, processing operation data to obtain meaningful safety-related information may require excessive hardware and software resources.
In addition, interpretation of safety-related information can involve arbitrary targets, which can lead to inefficiency due to overcorrection or under-correction. Use of such targets usually result in an exception-based reporting system, in which only drivers that fail to conform to targets are provided with feedback. In addition, targets may also result in too many false alarms, which can eventually lead to a loss of confidence in such systems. Further, known systems are typically driver-centric and mainly consider driver behaviour without giving due consideration to other factors.
Another disadvantage of known systems is that there is a lack of techniques for obtaining safety-related information from different types of EOBR devices within the same fleet of vehicles.